Get a life
Hiring coaches a growing trend to achieve personal goals
BY MEGAN K. SCOTT
The Associated Press
This story ran on nwitimes.com on Sunday, July 30, 2006 12:10 AM CDT
Ruth Kaufman was tired of the stress that had become part of her job. As an account manager for legal research firm Westlaw in Chicago, she wanted something that was less of a strain and that allowed her time to pursue her acting and writing.
So four years ago, Kaufman hired a life coach. The two met regularly for almost eight months. Kaufman had assignments: Research other jobs. Find a writing mentor. Think about life goals.
In the end, about $2,500 later, her life coach helped her to decide to stick it out until she could stop working full time, she said.
"I found out jobs I was capable of doing without more school, I would either have to travel a lot, which would make my second lifestyle more difficult, or I would make less money," said Kaufman, who finally stopped working last year.
"I did feel better knowing that. Coaching was very helpful. I did a lot of introspection. I learned more about myself and my goals."
Kaufman is one of a growing number of people hiring coaches to help them define and achieve any number of goals. And there aren't just life coaches any more. There are coaches for weight loss, relationships, attention deficit disorder, spirituality, health and, of course, love.
There are coaching schools, and colleges, including New York University and John F. Kennedy University in California, that are offering classes. You can even watch variations on coaching in action on prime time. ABC has aired "How to Get the Guy" (romance coaching), and TLC offers "Shalom in the Home" (family and relationship coaching) and "Honey, We're Killing the Kids!" (nutrition coaching).
The 11-year-old International Coach Federation, a nonprofit membership organization, estimates there are 30,000 coaches in the world. More than 10,000 are in the ICF, a 300 percent increase since 2000. There are an estimated 30 types of coaches, judging by listings on the Internet.
But while the profession branches out into new specialties, coaching remains a relatively new and unregulated profession. Traditional mental health professionals continue to question whether coaching is always a good solution, even as some of them start coaching businesses themselves. And coaches criticize one another about who has the most training. After all, anyone can call himself a "coach," and what that means isn't at all clear.
"A therapist really deals with issues that are from your past that have kept you from full healthful expression," said Pamela Richarde, president of the coach federation.
"Counseling, like a career counselor, is really telling you what you may be good at based on an analysis. Coaching takes you where you are today and says, 'It doesn't matter where you were before, where do you want to go. Let's design a plan together."'
Coaches help people come up with specific steps to reach their full potential by asking them questions and motivating them to follow through. Sessions are usually weekly on the phone and last between 30 minutes and one hour. Costs for life coaching vary from $100 to more than $300 per session.
Coaching has always been around, according to Sandy Vilas, CEO of Steamboat Springs, Colo.-based CoachInc.com. Once, coaches were parents, friends, relatives, teachers. Executive coaching came around in the 1970s. Coach U, owned by Coachinc.com, was founded in 1992 by Thomas Leonard, who also founded the ICF, Vilas said.
"He had this idea that people were looking for someone impartial to support them in achieving results in all areas of their lives," Vilas said.
"When he started out, he called himself a life planner, then changed it to coaching. He saw there was a need in the marketplace and started training people to fill that need."
That marketplace continues to grow and become more specific.
Mary Pearsall, a certified personal trainer and phone fitness coach in Colorado Springs, Colo., says her phone sessions offer more flexibility than in-person training can.
"Usually (with) a personal trainer, you have to meet him or her at a certain time or place. Busy people have a hard time keeping that appointment," she said.
"People can pretty much call me for 20 minutes each week from any place. I have had people call me from airports, from conferences, from the beach."
A former Cornell University gymnastics coach and saleswoman, Gretchen Sunderland became a full-time sales coach six years ago.
"We work on gremlin management: How do you deal with these voices that go around in everyone's head? I help them work with their own feelings of power and self-worth and the fact that they have a lot to offer already. I give them permission to shine."
While many coaches graduate from programs accredited by the ICF (there are about 50 worldwide), which requires 125 hours of coach-specific training and oral and written assessments, others are operating without any formal training. The ICF has a set of ethical standards that members pledge to uphold, but there is no formal board or agency overseeing the profession to make sure coaches are ethical and trained to recognize when someone needs mental help.
Neither the American Psychological Association and National Association of Social Workers has taken an official stance on the issue, but several mental health counselors are speaking out.
"Coaching is essentially counseling by another name in my opinion," said David Fresco, a psychology professor at Kent State.
"In the profession of psychology, it is a highly regulated and licensed industry. It's pretty clear what you're getting when someone refers to themselves as a psychologist. That is definitely not the case in the coaching profession."
Coaches are resistant to the idea of regulation, said Patrick Williams, founder and CEO of the Institute for Life Coaching, who is in charge of the ICF's regulation committee.
He said it would be impossible to license coaching because so many sessions are done over the phone, over state lines. Coaches want the profession to be regarded in the same way the work of financial planners, mediators and consultants is.
Williams, who was a psychologist before becoming a coach, said the ICF monitors its members and starting August will require coaches to be certified in order to receive full membership benefits.
Like Williams, a number of mental health professionals are entering the coaching business. The APA offers coaching training to members. Nine percent of the students at Coach U are therapists, according to Vilas.
Coaching in some cases is more lucrative and less of a headache because most health insurance doesn't cover it -- clients pay cash. People also feel more comfortable going to someone called a "coach."
"Society admires you for going to a coach and is a little bit suspicious if you go to a therapist," said Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz, a psychiatrist who runs a consulting business focusing on the psychology of business in New York.
"When you use the word 'coach' that makes people think of sports coaches."
There are countless stories from happy customers: Blaine Russell Herling, a physical therapist in Long Island, N.Y., who says he started meeting single women once he hired a love coach; Garrick Peters, a financial planner in Hollywood, Calif., who says he is winning poker games because he hired a poker coach; and Malena Lott, a brand strategist in Oklahoma City, who says she is more at peace because of her sessions with a life coach.
Lott said she hired a coach because her life was going in several directions. She had many goals, but she wasn't sure how to attain all of them.
"It helped me become clear about what I want out of life and set some new priorities," said Lott, who has three children and writes novels on the side.
"I just feel a lot more at peace about my relationships and definitely my writing career and looking at things that are outside of my control and being OK with that."
People are turning to coaches because they are busier than ever before, have aspirations and are more isolated, Vilas said.
A report in June from Duke University found that the number of people who said they had no one to discuss important issues with doubled to nearly 25 percent from 1985 to 2004.
Vilas said coaching produces results in a shorter amount of time because unlike therapy, a coach doesn't focus on issues in your past.
"What I love about coaching is it's not focused on pathology or problems," said Michael Kahn, a psychologist and coach in Severna Park. Md.
"It's focused on people wanting to make their lives better. 'How can I develop a strategy to make my life more the way I want it to be?' In general, it's seen as a more pro-active thing."
But that idea angers pure psychotherapists, who are struggling with their own image as people in white coats listening to someone rehash stories from childhood, diagnosing them and seeing them for years. (Coaches usually don't see someone for that long, unless the person is working on multiple goals.)
Some action-oriented psychology, said Fresco, such as cognitive and business psychology, can offer more immediate results. He said therapists can address the same issues as life coaches and have more training, experience and education. For example, sports psychologists focus a lot on performance enhancement as opposed to mental health.
"This term of life coach almost trivializes the amount of time, work and effort that goes into training every mental health professional because there is no regulation," said Madelyn Fernstrom, founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Weight Management Center.
"To simply have someone who is untrained deciding I will charge people for my advice as a professional, I think it's very wrong."
Vilas believes people are going to continue entering the coaching field, especially with the push for entrepreneurship and the love some people have for helping others achieve their goals.
He said that in the future, almost everyone is going to have a coach. He dismissed the idea that hiring a coach leads to dependency.
"All the doing is up to you," he said. "The coach doesn't do anything but ask the right questions."
Lott agreed.
"It's not that you are looking for advice," she said. "Coaches are there to lay the cards out on the table and say, 'OK, what are we going to do with this?' It's up to you. You're empowered to make the decision for your life."